Note: This is the 1938 article from
which Francisco Gil-White took 9 words to use in slandering Rabbi
Stephen Wise. I have highlighted those 9 words in green, and
the rest of the sentence in yellow.
--Jared Israel
Emperor's Clothes

===============================================

America Has Spoken [1938]

THE reaction of the
American people to the recent barbarities in the Nazi
Reich has been exactly what one might have expected from
a great and democratic people. America has recoiled with
horror and with loathing from the things that have been
done in pitilessly brutal reprisal against the Jews of
Germany. This loathing of Germany's shame has been
embodied in the protest of him who is in truth not
merely the President of the United States but the voice
of America's conscience. It has been moving and
heartening alike from the viewpoint of civilization to
note that after infinitely patient waiting for nearly
six years in the hope that reason might prevail over
savagery, the Christian churches and peoples of America
have spoken with one voice against the crime of a great
people against its own loyal and law-abiding Jewish
population.

If the American Jewish
Congress has not summoned great meetings, as it did in
1933 and in 1934 and again and again, it has been
because it was felt that what had happened in Germany
since the lamentable murder of a German official by a
grief-crazed Jewish lad, proved to the whole civilized
world beyond the peradventure of a doubt, that this had
ceased to be, if ever it was, a Jewish question, that
this had ceased to be, if ever it solely was, a German
question. What has happened in the last fortnight in the
German Reich and is happening is obvi-

-107-

***

ously become one of the
gravest problems of civilization.

For the first time in
the six years of the Nazi horror the masses that spoke
out included Americans of every faith and race and
tongue. So that all that we American Jews found needful
to do was and is to take our share in the sorrows and
the protests of the whole American people. The leading
statesmen, the princes of the church, the most eminent
of our journalists, the greatest of our educators have
spoken. We Jews echo and we thank God for the words of
former President Hoover, of Governor Alfred Landon, of
our own Al Smith, of Senator Robert Wagner, of William
Green, of Bishop Manning, of Harry Emerson Fosdick, of
John Haynes Holmes, of the most Reverend Archbishop
Curley of the Catholic Church and of a great number of
the most distinguished Americans who have lifted up
their voices and helped Germany to understand that
American civilization stands as one in detestation and
condemnation of Nazi brutality against a people,
despoiling them of their possessions, robbing them of
their status, violating and desecrating their holy
places beyond which not even Nazi savagery can go.

Not the least problem
now before the American people --as it has not
previously been, is the problem of boycotting Nazi wares
and services. This has ceased to be a problem. It ceased
to be a problem for us five years ago. For five years we
have been insisting that no self-respecting American
ought to touch Nazi-made goods or Nazi services. For
five years the American Jewish Congress, in conjunction
with the American Federation of Labor and other
liberty-prizing bodies, has wielded the non-violent
weapon of the boycott against Germany. Today the whole
American people realizes that it can no longer traffic
in the commerce to and from the German Reich. Even as
Jewish persecution in Germany has ceased to be a Jewish

-108-

***

question, so the boycott
in America must not for one hour remain a Jewish
boycott. It must be a boycott of all Americans who
loathe the things for which Nazism stands, not that
Germans may be hurt, but that Germany may be set free.
The way to liberate Germany is to cease to have commerce
with the German Reich.

THERE are many questions
which we American Jews must come to face. We know that
the Jews of Germany and Austria and largely
Czechoslovakia, are on the march and that an army of
involuntary emigrants is leaving and must leave and
should be enabled forever to leave Germany behind them.
The mass evacuation of a people rooted in Germany's soil
for a thousand years is one of the most loathsome crimes
of history.

Not being a race of
beggars, though we are wanderers, we must make clear to
the world that we are resolved that we are not to
become, nor to be dealt with as a refugee people,
even though the German-speaking peoples are forcing our
brother-Jews into exile. The refuges for Jews are the
lands in which they have lived for centuries and
millennia. We raise our voice today against every
proposal and program which deals with Jewish migrants or
exiles as if they were to be further penalized by being
settled in uninhabited lands, lands of doubtful title,
lands of uncertain capacity for colonization and
resettlement.

We lift up our voice in
most solemn protest against any and every. thought of
settling Jews in the German colonies of yesterday.
Having lived under the blight and burden of the
Swastika, no Jew must ever again be compelled to touch
the soil over which the German flag has been lifted up.
Moreover, we Jews do not believe in reprisal or in
vindictiveness. We do not wish even the German people to
believe that we desire to possess ourselves of lands

-109-

***

of which they have by
war been dispossessed. Moreover, the destruction of any
Jewish-occupied, one-time German colony would become the
supreme objective of Germany. We would have Jews live
anywhere outside of the Nazi Reich, live under almost
any conditions, but we will never give approval or
sanction to any plan which dooms Jews to live again in a
land defiled up to the days of peace by that government
which has sought to destroy them.

I would rather have my fellow-Jews die in Germany[Note from TENC: The preceding 10 words are the ones
taken out of their context and quoted by Francisco
Gil-White to provide false evidence for his slander that
Rabbi Wise wanted the Holocaust! - JI]than
live somehow, anyhow, in lands which bear the imprint of
yesterday's occupation by Germany, in lands which may
tomorrow be yielded back by England and France to
Germany, as all other conceivable concessions are being
made to the Nazi Reich.

With respect to the
right of Jews to live in the lands of which they have
been a part for many generations, one thing more remains
to be said. If England truly and genuinely wishes to
help German Jews to live, there are certain things that
it can do. We do not speak of the Dominions, Canada,
Australia, South Africa, for these must reach their own
decisions, but we think of one mandated territory of
England, namely Palestine. If the English Government
wishes to help Jews, it will admit Jewish children into
England as visitors. It will take such action as the
President of the United States has taken with regard to
temporary residence of German refugees. It will
cooperate genuinely with the Intergovernmental Committee
for Refugees, under the leadership in part of two great
Americans, Ambassador Myron Taylor and Director General
George Rublee, in establishing temporary, transient
homes or hostels for Jews of Germany, tens of thousands
of them, pending their ultimate distribution among the
lands, the provinces, the dominions, nations and
continents in which they will ultimately be integrated.

-110-

***

But the one great,
indeed supreme, service that England can render the
Jewish people, the whole Jewish people not merely German
Jews, is at once, without a moment's delay, to grant the
request of the Jewish population of Palestine that they
be permitted to welcome ten thousand Jewish children out
of Germany, another ten thousand Jewish adolescents,
another eight or ten thousand relatives in German lands.
In one word, England can do most today for German Jews
by opening wide the doors of Palestine. World opinion,
including American public opinion, will not only support
the British Government, but the conscience of mankind
will praise and bless the wisdom and the generosity, the
statesmanship and the nobleness of England, if it say to
the Arabs, to whom it can frankly speak: "This people is
homeless. It wishes to go home. You must be big enough
to welcome the homecoming Jews in Palestine." If Great
Britain fails to take the largest steps to give home not
shelter, home not refuge, to German Jews in Palestine,
all else that it contemplates and proposes and announces
will be in vain, and the very earnestness and sincerity
of English concern with the German refugees will be
questioned. This is the day for England to write a
worthy postscript to the Balfour Declaration.

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